Some disclosed teleconferencing methods may involve detecting a howl state during a teleconference. The teleconference may involve two or more teleconference client locations and a teleconference server. The teleconference server may be configured for providing full-duplex audio connectivity between the teleconference client locations. The howl state may be a state of acoustic feedback involving two or more teleconference devices in a teleconference client location. Detecting the howl state may involve an analysis of both spectral and temporal characteristics of teleconference audio data. Some disclosed teleconferencing methods may involve determining which client location is causing the howl state. Some such methods may involve mitigating the howl state and/or sending a howl state detection message.
Legal claims defining the scope of protection, as filed with the USPTO.
2. The method of claim 1, wherein short-term spectral features include a spectral peakiness measure (SPM), related to energy concentrated in narrow frequency ranges.
3. The method of claim 1, wherein short-term spectral features include an inter-percentile range (IPR), where the IPR for frame l is defined as IPR(l)=B(1, l)−B(k, l), where B(r, l) is the r:th order statistics version of bandpower for frame l, and k is a predefined portion of the number of frequency bands.
4. The method of claim 3, wherein k is 20%, 18% or 15% of the number of frames.
5. The method of claim 3, wherein IPR(l) is weighted using an input level and a spectral peakiness measure (SPM) in a weighting function.
6. The method of claim 1, further comprising at least mitigating the howl.
7. The method of claim 1, comprising sending a howl state detection message.
10. The method of claim 1, wherein the howl presence probability estimation is based on a hierarchical rule set or a machine learning process.
11. The method of claim 1, wherein the short-term spectral features and medium-term spectral and temporal features are selected from a list of consisting of: a power-based metric according to order statistics of frequency bands; a spectral resonance metric; an inter-percentile range metric; event aggregation; a periodicity metric; envelope similarity; and a spectral peakiness metric.
Cooperative Patent Classification codes for this invention. Click any code to explore related patents in that topic.
March 10, 2022
June 13, 2023
Browse 5M+ US patents with plain-English claim translations and AI-generated analysis.